airships and mellow technologies and fictional ideas (silly ramblings, really)

[Bryan Snyder]

I've read The Gnostic Pynchon twice and it is the best Pynchon study I've
read, and the side reading that it leads you into is also just wonderful
philosophical material (if that's your thing.)

Just for disclosure, I've (like many here I'm sure) have gone through the
various wiki's, and posted online material on the major sites... bought the
Gnostic Pynchon, Pynchon's Mythology, um... there's one essay book called
"Mindless Pleasures" (I think), an essay book on COL49, the various
companions etc.

Save, anything Mason and Dixon related as it is the last Pynchon book I
haven't read yet, but just started (can't wait to start the analytical
follow up reading just as much... well... lol.... almost as much as M & D
itself.)

Anyway, I just wanted to give some kind of credibility to my statement that
The Gnostic Pynchon (going then into Voegelin.. then Hans Jonas... ) is the
most meaningful Pynchon-related as well as philosophical reading I've
enjoyed to date (I'm a semi-well read 28 year old, again for disclosure.)
...Just SOME credibility... I'm not getting into how much.

I've been loving this particular message-thread, too.

B

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of robinlandseadel at comcast.net
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2007 9:09 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: RE: airships and mellow technologies and fictional ideas (silly
ramblings, really)

          Mark Kohut : is this 'existential' terror--this 
          pampas openness--- something we just have 
          to live with in TRPs  vision? 
  
          Monte Davis:
          Damfino. Nor do I insist that he know. It's a vision, 
          not a theory or philosophy or platform, despite our 
          valiant efforts to bonsai it.

Not to mention [top of my lungs one more time] Rilke, and the first few
lines 
of the Duino Elegies [influential enough that he folds them into the story]:

          Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
          hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
          pressed me against his heart, I would perish
          in the embrace of his stronger existence.
          For beauty is nothing but the beginning of 

                           terror

          which we are barely able to endure and are awed
          because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
          Each single angel is terrifying.

I haven't gotten into my Eddings yet, so I don't what he's got to say 
on the subject, but Pynchon's often rendering a Gnostic terror, like 
having a TMI moment for the rest of your life.

Though, predictably enough, Our Besotted Author approaches the subject 
ass-backwards. . . .

          It will come, it will, His Destiny . . . not that way---but it
will come

               . . . . Und nicht einmal sein Schritt klingt 
               aus dem tonlosen Los. . . . 

          Of all Rilke's poetry it's this Tenth Elgy he most loves, can feel

          the bitter lager of Yearning begin to prickle behind eyes and 
          sinuses at remembering his Lament, his last link, leaving now 
          even her marginally human touch forever, climbing all alone, 
          terminally alone, up and up into the mountains of primal Pain, 
          with the wildly alien constellations overhead. . . .And not once 
          does his step ring from soundless destiny. . . .GR, pg. P99/100

Kinda gets our boy back into the New England Transcendentalist swing of
things.
With his 'take' on angelic prescence and intervention, some of that one-one
flavor
of Gnosticism gets stirred into the mix.